Christmas In The United States Of America

The First Christmas Tree

Christmas lighting is used widely to decorate roadways in towns and cities. But the most well-known Christmas street illumination in the United States is found at Rockefeller Center in New York. It features a massive Christmas tree and a large ice skating rink in front of it during the Christmas and New Year holidays.

German settlers in Pennsylvania became the first to decorate Christmas trees in the United States. As early as the 1750s, there were some community trees. On the other hand, trees would have been considered strange outside these societies!

Christmas was only a religious celebration for the Puritans who created much of New England and the eastern United States. In 1659, a Massachusetts court deemed it illegal to celebrate December 25th in any way other than going to church!

Charles Follen of Boston was a German political refugee. He planted the first tree in his home in the United States in 1832. His wife’s memoirs, written ten years later, documented this. And we can find earlier American tree records in diaries and letters dating back to 1842 in Virginia, 1847 in Ohio, and 1851 in South Carolina and Mississippi.